Crazy Bananas

What is Crazy Bananas?

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) agrees, continuing to defend its claimed “exclusive jurisdiction” over sports prediction markets in federal and state courts across the nation.

The legal wrangling extends to Michigan, where Attorney General Dana Nessel has rejected Polymarket and the CFTC’s arguments that the Michigan Gaming Control Board has no regulatory authority over prediction markets, even the ones allowing traders to buy and sell shares of sports outcomes.

Since returning its prediction market to the US, Polymarket has regularly engaged in nonconforming advertising. Painting a water tower in the company’s blue and branding the structure with its logo is the firm’s latest marketing ploy.

What is Crazy Bananas?

Same thing that happened in 2012. I’m sad, but once again, I’m just beaten to the punch. My whole adult life has been that way and I can’t really explain how or why other than to say it I’m constantly being pushed in the direction I’m already going in.

So here’s what happens from here, in my view. In a few months, food price increases are going to start to become very glaringly obvious. Price inflation will not be able to be hidden anymore. You can tinker with the inflation statistics only so much, but once it gets to food prices, it’s game over. It’s already happening. Food bills are rising and are about to rise much faster.

That inflation is going to be priced into bond yields very quickly and the balance sheets of all the banks with worthless bonds squirting out of their eyeballs are all going to collapse. All at the same time. The whole process once it starts will take no more than weeks. The Fed will embark on one last round of printing to try to save the system one more time, but it will not work. Not this time. This time, the dollar, the reserve currency of the world, will be completely destroyed, and with it all other fiat currencies and the entire global financial system. Done, finished, the end. That means everything running on the assumption that dollars have any value, including the electricity grids that mine cryptocurrencies mind you, will freeze up.

How to play Crazy Bananas

The first was direct marketing (emails, texts, push notifications). Citing randomised studies, the committee noted that limiting direct marketing resulted in reduced betting and fewer short-term harms. 

Referencing an Australian study on direct marketing and its link to gambling harms, Dr Philip Newall, senior lecturer at the University of Bristol noted that “causality was established by getting a random subset of participants to opt-out of receiving direct marketing offers”.

It was found that “this group then self-reported significantly lower expenditure and harms [ … ] over the next two weeks”.